1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic messaging and more particularly to the auto-complete feature for message addresses in an electronic messaging system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging represents the single most useful task accomplished over wide-scale computer communications networks. Some argue that in the absence of electronic messaging, the Internet would have amounted to little more than a science experiment. Today, electronic messaging seems to have replaced the ubiquitous telephone and fax machine for the most routine of interpersonal communications. As such, a variety of electronic messaging systems have arisen which range from real-time instant messaging systems and wireless text pagers to asynchronous electronic mail systems.
Electronic mail, a form of electronic messaging referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties. Today, more e-mails are processed in a single hour than phone calls. Clearly, e-mail as a mode of communications has been postured to replace all other modes of communications, save for voice telephony.
In the conventional e-mail client, an end user can create an e-mail with a body of text and the end user optionally can attach one or more files to be transmitted along with the message in the body of text. Before transmitting the e-mail, the end user further can address the e-mail by providing one or more e-mail addresses and designating those addresses as primary recipients (To:) of the e-mail, secondary recipients (CC:) of the e-mail, or stealth recipients (BCC:) of the e-mail. For the casual e-mail user, remembering e-mail addresses can be of no consequence. For the dedicated e-mail user, however, remembering a vast number of different e-mail addresses can present a challenge.
Many successful commercial implementations of e-mail clients provide for an auto-completion feature. An auto-completion feature generally refers to the automated recollection by the e-mail client (or the e-mail server) of past used or previously stored e-mail addresses based upon the provision of just one or more characters of the desired e-mail address. In this way, the end user need only key a few keystrokes followed by a mouse click in order to accept the proposed e-mail address. The convenience of auto-completion is not without consequence, however.
Specifically, the speed at which an end user accepts a proposed e-mail address as part of the auto-completion operation often can result in the end user accepting the wrong e-mail address. As a result, in many circumstances, the end user can transmit an e-mail message to an un-intended recipient. In the worst case scenario, the content of the e-mail message can be private and confidential giving rise to an unintended breach of privacy.